How To Pick Out The Stupid People?

Intelligence, at its very basic level, can be defined as the ability to make a decision based on changing inputs. Heaven as it is described has no changing inputs so it is easy to see that intelligence is not required and indeed is shuned in heaven. There is no way to show that life on Earth is a test for heaven unless you are trying to pick out the stupid people.

Hi Mal,
No one… no one… can say they know what REALLY goes on in heaven.
But down here I know I’m loved by someone “up there”. This love is palpable to my soul. I can feel it. So I can only take a stab at guessing what REAL love is like, that’s going on “up there”.
robin

Hi Mal,
Soooo, my take on Lucifer’s biography… You ask hard questions. I don’t know if I can really answer that, as I wasn’t there when Lucifer was growing up. That might sound silly, but I’m trying to only answer honestly from where I’ve been, as an earthling-type being.

I grew up in a house full of Lucifer’s henchmen demons [I don’t think we rated Lucifer himself since he’s purported to not be omnipresent]. There was anger, hate, horrible sadness and depression there. My father used to scream at Satan in the basement. True. There was evil all around. I feared for my life – a lot – when I was growing up. As a child I was forced to interact with all this evil. I fought not just death, but of being annihilated, body, soul, spirit. Where am I going with all of this? I don’t know. I’m just writing the first things coming to my mind while I ponder your question. These are my own experiences and thoughts.

I’ve heard that Lucifer was God’s most beloved angel who didn’t want any god to rule over him… so he left heaven and went on the rampage to become God himself. This is the story I’ve been told. I don’t know. Like I said before, I wasn’t present when all that went down on that – went down.

Do I seriously believe there is such a thing as “evil” in our world? Christians call it Lucifer/Satan. I don’t know it’s “name” but I know it exists. As a child I touched it, smelt it, felt it, and was very, very burned by it. I am a recovering burn victim.

I ponder things which are too often taken for granted. There is no doubt in the mind of any atheist that humankind has exactly the credentials for great anger, rage, and violence. My stance on mechanical atheism is such that I do understand that the human brain can be broken – not work right. In those times, it is capable of great harm. This is not evil, no matter how much we want to assume that all brains are good, all minds are equal – they are not.

Satan gets the blame for a lot of stuff that is much more simply explained by broken brains. Jesus cast out demons to heal the sick. While this seems to exhault him as having power over them, why were they allowed in the first place? It ruins the idea of free will. Satan doesn’t exist. He came from nowhere as if he existed outside of the creation of all existence, as if god was not alone when he made creation. It’s a confusing point and the stories can be read with the conclusion that satan is just one of gods personalities. You see the one that is all love yet the rest of the world gets to see the others. There is one personality that allows children to starve to death. In fact it’s probable that he let 12 of them starve to death while you are reading this reply.

If you only ever see one face, you only ever see a small facet. One of god’s faces is Satan. As the story goes, Satan was yet another of god’s creation that is not happy with him. God is not perfect or at least does not create perfect beings. All of them we have been told about have turned away or ignored him. I wonder why that is… ?

In my estimation, God is everything. And that includes “Love” and “Absence of Love” both. Everything. I hear a lot of people talking about “God is Love” but if God is everything there is, then God is also “No Love”. But love is allowing a being – to just be. To just be the way they decide they want to be. It’s full-on acceptance. And if this being wanted to live a life rejecting Him, He, because there is full on acceptance-type love, allows that being – to be without Him. And to be without Him is ok. But also, to be without him – Love – is what hell is all about.
robin
ps – My sister told me that one time she was coming up the stairs from the basement and “something” pushed her so hard up the stairs that it made her fall forwards. What do you think that was all about?
r

A misinterpretation of the facts. Anecdotal evidence means little if anything. If everyone who used those stairs felt it… that’s different. One person feeling it once, not so much evidence of anything but loss of balance or something. Our brains are capable of a lot of things, misinterpreting things is just one of them. Look out into your yard on a moonless night – see any dark objects in the lawn? What are they? Did one move? We interpret what we sense to make a conclusion that fits other stuff we know. A back spasm while carrying something might feel like a push.

Before Jesus introduced Himself I did not know love. I did not know the meaning of the word. Now I do. Before Jesus I knew as much about love as we know about the farthest galaxy in the universe. Now I know it. Now I know it deep in my heart. How could that have happened? Maybe someone loved you as a child. As a child, no one loved me. That concept was completely foreign to me.
robin

Clearly, no deity is required to know what love is. There are plenty of examples to back up that statement. That you know what it is now… this is good. The universe doesn’t much care one way or the other. The god of Abraham doesn’t either. He allowed Job’s family to be tortured just to prove a point. He arranged the deaths of all the first born of Egypt to prove a point. This god is not concerned if you find love, only that you claim to love him. Knowing love is not a requirement even for heaven, only that you claim to love him. You can, on some levels, say that god of Abraham is about love but you cannot say that he is all about showing it to everyone. Think of all the people that died never knowing of the Jesus story. They don’t get to heaven. That’s not love. The god of Abraham condemns me and all humanity because of the trick he played on Adam and Eve. The god of Abraham is an abusive and violent tyrrant. It’s no good to say that Jesus is different – he did not change the law or repent over anything the god of Abraham had done. To this day there is violence in the world because of that story… that god. The god of Abraham is not ‘all love.’ He is a jealous and vengeful god, a murderous and genocidal tyrrant. Whatever you found, it did not come from the god of Abraham. I know of not one atheist that would begrudge you finding peace and good and love in your life. I also don’t know of any that would say ‘oh, it must be god’ … If your love comes from the god of Abraham I pity you.

Any being that says ‘love me or I will torture you forever’ is not a loving being. Slavery is all good as long as the slave wants to be a slave. What happens when the slave says they deserve a bit more respect? Oh, that’s right. The god of Abraham is far and away okay with slavery as is his ‘son’ Jesus. It’s all in the book.

“my take on Lucifer”? Your take on Lucifer or anything is completely irrelevant. Your take on things doesnt make anything true. It is just your take. Like my take on some political issue. Which is fine, you can have lots of various takes on various things. The problem with religious people, however, is that they want to impose their “take” on things onto society. On the larger level religion is just flat out dangerous and detrimental. I really feel sorry for people like you – you are wasting your mind believing in the kind of crap a 5th grader could disprove. Listen to yourself, you sound like a child describing a fairy tale book “the evil witch” and ‘the demon”.

How do you know someone is “up there” to love you? What is that up there anyway? The stratosphere? Space? our solar system? The milky way? Andromeda? Black matter? Who is up there? Or are you seriously imagining there is a space in the atmosphere with all that love residing? Your feeling of this love is nothing but your imagination and immense desire to believe. You want to believe and you want to believe so hard it has become a reality in your head. But that is all there is. In your head. The only thing up there is layer of gases surrounding planet Earth and retained by Earth’s gravity. There is no there, there.